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One Hour Photo


Ckulakov

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The film "One Hour Photo" directed by Mark Romanek featured a intresting sequence that had a visual style (mainly in terms of color) that was very particular to home consumer 35mm still camera prints. The way everything appeared very much reminded me of the color and proccesing that you can get at a wal-mart or cvs. How did they accentuate the home still camera features by using a pro motion picture film camera?

 

Thanks

Edited by Ckulakov
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The film "One Hour Photo" directed by Mark Romanek featured a intresting sequence that had a visual style (mainly in terms of color) that was very particular to home consumer 35mm still camera prints. The way everything appeared very much reminded me of the color and proccesing that you can get at a wal-mart or cvs. How did they accentuate the home still camera features by using a pro motion picture film camera?

 

Thanks

You mean the part where Sy is looking into that still photograph on his lunch break, and the camera turns to him holding a red jumper?

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A camera is a dark box with a hole in front and a piece of curved glass to focus light. There rest is just variations on this theme. So there is no difference in the way a motion picture camera exposes film or a LF camera or a 35mm consumer point and shoot.

They differ in mechanisms to control exposure time, and in the glass.

The glass can affect the image only in some specific things like contrast, sharpness, vignetting, geometric distortions, bokeh etc. but those differences are also visible through the viewfinder, and there is no great difference in the "look" when you watch through two different viewfinders, because those things are barely noticable.

So really, the camera has nothing to do with the "look" of consumer prints

 

Next stop is the film of course.

 

c41 consumer film, c41 professional film and ECN2 professional film all work on the same basic principles using the same technology. The difference is in how they are tuned.

 

I've never experimented using motion picture film in a still camera, but from what I can see from other peoples experiments (and John should confirm this or debunk it)

ECN2 film has a shift in the gamma of the blue/yellow chanel, causing a blue-yellow crossover shift when scanning on still scanners and printing to still papers. Highlights tend to be yellow, while shadows tend to be blue because the blue gamma is lower than with still films.

I think ECP print film is designed with this in mind and corrects this.

Which means if you used still c41 film for printing onto ECP stock, the result would be reverse, because still film has too much blue gamma for motion picture print stock, which would make highlights blue and shadows warm.

Then there is the contrast. Motion picture film has less overall gamma than avarage consumer c41 film, which is designed to bring saturated and contrasty prints. But professional c41 film has more latitude, natural colors and less contrast, and is probably more similar to motion picture film in that respect.

 

But non of this is the cause for the look of consumer 35mm prints.

It really has to do with scanners and scanning software used in minilab machines. They tend to clip highlights, blow the contrast up.

Another reason is cheap film processing which can cause grainy negatives, crossover problems, more contrast and less saturation. One thing that can cause this is insuficient bleaching. Which is sometimes done on purpuse in motion pictures, but is one of the main problems with consumer processing.

 

I haven't seen the movie, but I bet if you used on-camera light in combination with bleach bypass, you'd get a typical flash snapshot look.

Edited by Filip Plesha
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